Chandrabindu
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Chandrabindu (lit. 'Moon-dot' in Sanskrit, alternatively spelt candrabindu or chôndrôbindu) is a diacritic sign with the form of a dot inside the lower half of a circle. It is used in the Devanagari (ँ), Bengali-Assamese (ঁ), Gujarati (ઁ), Odia (ଁ), Telugu (ఁ), Javanese ( ꦀ) and other scripts.
It usually means that the previous vowel is nasalized.
In Hindi, it is replaced in writing by anusvara when it is written above a consonant that carries a vowel symbol that extends above the top line.
In Classical Sanskrit, it means by pronouncing by our nose seems to occur only over a lla conjunct consonant, to show that it is pronounced as a nasalized double l, which occurs if -nl- have become assimilated in sandhi.
In Vedic Sanskrit, it is used instead of anusvara to represent the sound anunaasika when the next word starts with a vowel. It usually occurs where in earlier times a word ended in -ans.
Unicode encodes chandrabindu and chandrabindu-like characters for a variety of scripts:[1]
- U+1B01 ᬁ BALINESE SIGN ULU CANDRA
- U+1B00 ᬀ BALINESE SIGN ULU RICEM
- U+0981 ঁ BENGALI SIGN CANDRABINDU
- U+11C3C